A way of making concepts and abstractions easier to understand is to project them onto another dimension and scale. For example, the passage of time and what you can do with it is difficult to fully comprehend so a common projection is ‘time is money’. We understand money as a tangible asset and generally how much things cost (another projection is what you can buy with that money) which makes it easier to value time appropriately.
However, choosing the wrong dimension is a logical fallacy. For example, asking ‘how red is the temperature?’
Links to this note
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A Weak Man Argument Recenters a Category to Defeat It
A ‘weak man’ argument presents a belief that only a small number of people have in order to defeat it. This is similar to a ‘straw man’, but a straw man presents a belief that no one has in order to defeat it. A ‘weak man’ is a more believable logical fallacy.
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A ‘back of the napkin’ estimate that can be quite accurate. By estimating multiple variables somewhat accurately and both underestimating and overestimating, the variables tend to balance out and result in accuracy within an order of magnitude. This is usually enough to get a general idea of the problem and solution which is useful, similar to dimensional analysis like Big O Notation.